Leaving one opportunity… The last couple months, I’ve been on the job market; my previous employer, mLab, was acquired by MongoDB and there wasn’t a good role for a full-time Pythonista with my particular open source baggage on the other side of that transition.
mLab was a great place to work and (per my 2016 post) a staunch supporter of my OSS, both re: time on the clock and real-world use cases.

Intro When it comes to software maintenance tradeoffs, most of what I laid out in “The why & when of software releases” remains accurate. An ‘iron triangle’ exists between speed, stability, and ease of maintenance – it’s impossible to prioritize all three.
I historically prioritize stability, specifically via bugfix-oriented release branches – users can stick to a given minor version even after subsequent feature releases appear, with the implied contract that they can install updates from those branches without anything breaking.

This is a quick review of Bear Writer, a popular note-taking application that I tried out a few weeks ago. A much larger and more detailed post about my overall quest for a note-taking solution (I have very picky, perhaps contradictory requirements) is forthcoming!
The good Bear is a beautiful set of applications. Attractive without being ostentatious or getting in the way, pretty quick/slick to use, desktop and mobile apps clearly resemble each other, etc.

It took (much) longer than anticipated, for a number of reasons, and like any
good .0 release it’ll take a few minor releases to really get up to speed –
but it’s here! Fabric 2.0.0 is now out
on PyPI, along with the project that does much of the heavy lifting, Invoke
1.0.0.

Please see the upgrade
documentation for the gory
details, and if you like, read on for some non-instructive reflection on the
occasion.

Opening remarks

This has been a hard blog post to write; not in a technical sense (though
blogging always is - it’s why I don’t do more of it!) but simply because Fabric
2 has been “coming soon” for what feels like ages, and putting it out in the
open turns out to involve a lot of emotions.

Along with some general site maintenance in preparation for another big
announcement (!), I wanted to note that I’ve started a ‘reviews’ section of the
site’s static content. Mostly to port over something that had lived in my
private vimwiki and that I’d been exporting as a Github gist; content living in
a gist always feels dirty to me, especially when I have an ostensibly easy to
use website…

Being picky As mentioned in my 2015 round-up post, I’ve been trying to make ends meet, re: open source plus a paying job. In March, I parted ways with a bunch of great people to take time off1 and embark on a job hunt.
My goal was to find a company that could dedicate time to upstream maintenance, used my projects heavily in production, or both:
Without a clear split between “internal” and “external” development time, prioritization becomes a tug of war leaving both sides unhappy.